I am a professor of strategy and leadership at the Tuck School of Business atDartmouth College, as well as the Faculty Director of the Tuck Executive Program. My academic degrees are from the London School of Economics (M.Sc.) and Columbia University (Ph.D.). When I’m not at Tuck working with some of the greatest MBA students in the world, I am an active consultant and speaker to senior executives around the globe, as well as an executive coach. My research and consulting work focuses on how to develop the world’s best talent, corporate governance, learning from mistakes, and strategies for growth. I’ve written 15 books and over 75 articles, including the #1 bestseller in the U.S. and Japan, Why Smart Executives Fail. Honors include being a Fellow of the Academy of Management, and I’m listed in the “World’s Top 25 Leadership Gurus.”

Jack Welch is Wrong

Jack Welch, along with his wife Suzy, have weighed in on a Wall Street Journal editorial that “corporations are people.” In classic Welch style, the article is full of hyperbole, but is especially studded with hollow arguments that do more to make precisely the case they are against.

Throughout the article the Welches replace the word “corporations” with “buildings” apparently to indicate how ludicrous it is to argue that buildings “don’t hire people,” or buildings “don’t design cars.” Wow! Buildings don’t do that, people do. And lo and behold, that’s exactly what they argue. Not that buildings do anything, but that people do everything. In trying to make the case that corporations are people, they are rather more effective at making the case that people in corporations are what counts. Exactly!

There’s more. After ridiculing senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren for saying, people “love and they cry and they dance” they then go on in a subsequent paragraph to state, “people in corporations do indeed love and cry and dance.” Man, talk about making your point clear to readers.

What really seems to have trigged Jack and Suzy here is there unflinching support for Mitt Romney, who famously said that corporations are people. They then throw in the canard that to say otherwise is an attack on capitalism. Please.

Corporations are not people, except in certain legal circumstances in America that has helped create a PAC-MAN world of high rollers bankrolling their preferred candidate. More to the point, it is people – entrepreneurs, executives, salesclerks, and factory workers alike – that are at the heart of American capitalism. When they come together in something we call an organization, whether for-profit or non-profit, great things are possible. But the organization, or the corporation, is not a living breathing entity. Without people a corporation is dead, a legal creation that cannot do anything unless people direct it to do so.

If you want to support Mitt Romney, go ahead. If you want to support capitalism, go full steam ahead. But don’t rely on circuitous logic that does not stand up to common sense. People create, produce, and sometimes thrive in corporations, but that does not make a corporation a person.

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